Knitting Memories, by Lynn Neal
The mittens feel soft and warm on our hands as the snow piles up and the wind blows. Clad in bulky snowsuits, my brother, sisters, and I build a snow fort and snowman. Soon, though, the mittens will be soggy with snowflakes, and our boot-clad feet will be cold.
Almost fifty winters later, my siblings and I sit around the dining room table and tell stories about having to put our feet in bread bags to keep them dry– due to the sorry state of snow boots in the 1970s. My brother then vividly recounts getting his first pair of well-constructed and warm boots at Brand Names. None of us, though, tell a story about the mittens.
Unlike the purchased snow boots of a brand my brother still remembers, these mittens are handmade. I don’t know when I received them, only that I wore and kept them. There’s no label or elaborate design, just the ongoing pattern made by the back-and-forth rows of knitting and purling. Their muted blue color selected maybe to match a winter coat, but more likely to hide the dirt from building snow forts and doing farm chores. A little fuzzy from wear and washings, the yarn feels soft, yet a little coarse– all evidence of its acrylic origins. Strands of yarn dangle at the wrist, and my fingers poke through the little holes in the top seam. One is slightly larger than the other. Despite these imperfections and their apparent fragility, the mittens endure, as does my mom, who made them for me.
I don’t remember my mom knitting when I was little, but she did. She sewed clothes, canned fruits and vegetables, cooked all the meals, fed the pigs, mowed the lawn, and knit mittens. The economy of farm life demanded such industriousness and frugality. At 82, my mom doesn’t sew anymore, and she’s more likely to throw in a microwave dinner than cook. The pigs are gone, and someone else mows her lawn. The knitting, though, remains.
When I call her on the phone, I ask, “What have you been doing, Mom?”
“Knitting mittens,” she responds.
She knits a few pairs for her great-grandchildren, but the rest she donates. This year, 37 pairs.
She rocks in her chair, knitting, surrounded by colorful skeins of yarn, a torn pattern for mittens, and a small heap of scraps. There’s a pile of mittens on the loveseat. Each pair tied together with a contrasting color of yarn. Red mittens, blue mittens, green mittens, some striped, some solid, some big, some small. They’re more colorful than my mittens, but they’re still acrylic and, like mine, sometimes, oftentimes, one is a little bigger than the other.
My always moving and ever busy mother doesn’t spin yarns about the old days or her life. She’s a doer, a maker. Sometimes a pair of new boots draws more attention for a moment, but these mittens stitched with love tell her story, and they endure.
